Custom PC UK March 2022

/ FROM THE EDITOR Hoping for a happier year appy New Year, fellow PC-loving people. May your 2022 be filled with exciting hardware launches, awesome new game releases and maybe, just maybe, some decent stock of PC kit at reasonable prices. We can always hope. If all goes well, there’s some good stuff coming out this year. You can take a look at the hardware we’re eagerly anticipating on p88, and Rick has a rundown of some new game releases to expect on p76. Surely 2022 has got to be better than 2021 for PC hardware, hasn’t it? Looking back over 2021 reveals a tough time for the PC business. At the start of the year, there was practically no stock of AMD’s Zen 3 Ryzen 9 CPUs, and Intel’s Core i9-11900K was…

This year, for the first time in years, we’ll have three companies – AMD, Intel and Nvidia – vying for space in the low-end graphics card market. Nvidia already has its GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 variants, while Intel will be launching its Arc A380 and AMD will bring out the Radeon RX 6500 and 6400. The performance of the Nvidia cards is well known, and none of the Intel and AMD GPUs are expected to set performance records, even at this level. However, for gamers who play at 1,920 x 1,080, the expanding competitive options could at least result in dropped prices. These cards will also offer a solid step up for anyone stuck using very old GPUs or integrated graphics. If we purely consider the leaked specs – the…

I love writing the New Year column, it gives me a chance to look back on 12 months of opinions – overall, things change a lot while staying much the same. I’ve been a PC user since the early 1980s thanks to my dad’s career in computing, and a proud gamer since I was old enough to press the BREAK key. I’ve seen controversies come and go, debates about the influence or importance of technology and gaming in particular debated in Parliament, newspapers and by concerned parents everywhere. I’ve always felt grateful for having parents who could see that a child who can code, type and knows how computers work will always find employment, and a child who has access to video games will never be bored. In this column I’ve…

Samsung has started sampling GDDR6 memory chips running at speeds of 2.5GHz (20GHz effective) and 3GHz (24GHz effective). The company’s GDDR6 product page (custompc.co.uk/GDDR6) lists the two new chips, with ‘Sample’ written in the ‘Product Status’ column. The two new chips have a density of 16Gb (2GB), and are organised into 32 512Mb blocks. These speeds are faster than the 1219MHz (19.5GHz effective) speed of the GeForce RTX 3090’s GDDR6X. As a point of comparison, the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT’s GDDR6 memory runs at 2GHz (16GHz effective).…

MSI has given us a teaser of what’s to come from its forthcoming MEG Z690 Godlike motherboard – a detachable touch-screen. In a video, MSI has shown off the screen sitting in a shroud next to the motherboard’s DIMM slots. The screen shows off some MSI logos, and then goes into the menus. Among the screen’s features demonstrated in the video are a clear-CMOS button, along with plus and minus buttons for the CPU clock, and options for a safe boot and retrying an overclock, plus power and reset buttons. While the bling factor is clearly a large part of the screen’s appeal, we wonder if it might enable you to set up your PC, and check its status, without needing a monitor and GPU, which could be handy in the early…

GEFORCE RTX 3090 Ti INCOMING According to various online sources, including videocardz.com, Nvidia is planning to launch a new top-end GPU, called the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti, in early 2022, with availability expected on 27 January. According to the rumours, RTX 3090 Ti cards will have 10,752 CUDA cores (compared to 10,496 on the standard RTX 3090), while its 24GB of GDDR6X memory will run at 21GHz (effective) – a boost over the 19.5GHz (effective) memory used on the standard RTX 3090. CHEAPER AMPERE GPUS COMING According to regular tech leaker @kopite7kimi on Twitter, Nvidia has two new low-end GPUs based on its Ampere architecture in the pipeline. Apparently based on the same GA106 GPU as the RTX 3060, the new GPUs are said to come in both 4GB and 8GB options. According…